When I finished
high school in Chico in 1926, I came down here because I was tired
of shining shoes and washing windows. That's about all the work
there was for black people up there. There were very few blacks
on Fillmore Street then. The first black place that became well-known
was Jack's Tavern, that opened right around 1938. White San Francisco
discovered they could hear very good jazz there. They started coming
out in large numbers. And, of course, not too long after that Pearl
Harbor occurred, and they needed a lot of war workers. Then the
blacks started pouring in here. In 1940, the black population of
San Francisco was less than 5,000. There were actually more blacks
living in Berkeley and Oakland than in San Francisco.

On Former
Mayor Roger Lapham

He called a
press conference, as the mayors always do, and I went there for
the Sun-Reporter. I met the mayor and he pulled me aside. He said,
"Mr. Fleming, how long do you think these colored people are going
to be here?" And I said, "Mr. Mayor, you know how permanent the
Golden Gate Bridge is out there?" He said, "Yes." "Well," I said,
"the black population is just as permanent because we don't need
a passport to come here. We're American citizens. And San Francisco
may as well prepare itself to find jobs and housing for them, because
they aren't going back down south. They can get more money here
than picking cotton in the fields."

A lot of blacks
had bought houses out there. Some of those houses were really run
down, but they could have selected some of those places to work
on and they would have been in good shape for another forty years.
We felt that since blacks moved into the core areas of all the big
cities in the country, that this was the government's scheme to
get them out of the core areas. That's basically how we felt because
it wasn't only happening in San Francisco. It was happening all
over the United States. We weren't the only ones to call Urban Renewal,
"Black Removal." They were calling it the same thing back in New
York, Chicago, and Kansas City; all the other places they were doing
it.